Gil Hates Everything

“I let my pain fuck my ego and I call the bastard art”…

It’s difficult to tell exactly what’s going on in this one. From the songs, you can tell that a musician goes off on a journey, taking in Amsterdam, where he spends some time getting high, and he has some relationships which help him grow as a person, and there’s a lot of emphasis on finding “the real”. Wikipedia isn’t all that more helpful. So let’s file this under semi-metaphorical self-development. Does that remind you of 70s prog rock? To my inner (or possibly outer) Prog Rock Fan, this sounds like a modern take on “The Wall”. And that’s a handy start, like the way “Hedwig And The Angry Inch” won me over by kicking off with songs that sounded like Bowie in Berlin. This reminded me of “The Wall”, of albums by The Who, and slightly of “Rent” (rock musical cliche I know, but “Rent” casts a long shadow) – but it also seemed very much its own creature.

This review will stay short, at an admittedly sketchy but positive level. I enjoyed listening to this. It’s sometimes noisy, and it’s sometimes not easy listening tonally, let alone for its subject matter, but it wasn’t really dull at any point. Based on the soundtrack, I now want to watch the movie, at least.

On which subject: Spike Lee is quoted as saying that he filmed this show to preserve it “for generations and generations to see”. So let’s bulk out this post with a rant. Why aren’t more Broadway productions filmed? I don’t mean “let’s make a movie of this show”, I mean why don’t you film the damn show. It’s not like this is is technically impossible…. pretty much every theatre group I’ve heard of manages it. (Oops, is that supposed to be a secret? OMG! Sorry!!!) We live in a remote-viewing world, where brutal bad luck can destroy perfectly good shows far too early, but more importantly, where the audience willing to pay live-theatre prices is, shall we charitably say, “small”… where even successful shows would lose money if not sponsored and subsidized up the wazoo, benefiting from sales of overpriced souvenirs and glossy programmes and concessions (an ironic name if ever there was one). It’s time to admit that musical theatre is like opera: its actual, honest, devoted audience can’t support it. It’s time to go to the masses with it. Why not have live simulcasts like the Met? C’mon, even opera has worked out that people will pay a few bucks to watch something from five thousand miles away, and will enjoy it. But musical theatre? Apparently not. The “people’s opera” has lost its people. Apparently it’s more important to preserve the uniqueness of ‘being there’, even though it can’t possibly happen for 99.9999% of the world’s population. If this art is so damn important, why not let everyone see it? I want more movies of musicals, and I want simultaneous broadcasts from Broadway theatres. Growl, rant, etc. Make it happen. Keep me informed.

Anyway.

Random Panda – you know you missed me! – awards this a speculatively confident eight out of ten pieces of bamboo.

(originally posted 2009)